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Where did Rainer Maria Rilke complete the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus?
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Rainer Maria Rilke
Austro-German poet and writer Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902.
Rainer Maria Rilke completed both the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in February 1922 while residing at the Château de Muzot, a castle located in the RhÓne Valley of Switzerland.12
Although Rilke had begun the Duino Elegies years earlierāstarting the first two poems while visiting the castle of Duino on the Adriatic in 1912āhis work on the cycle was interrupted by the emotional impact of World War I. After moving to the ChĆ¢teau de Muzot in the summer of 1921, he experienced a period of intense, "manic" productivity in early 1922, during which he finished the remaining five elegies of the cycle and composed the entire collection of 55 poems that comprise the Sonnets to Orpheus within a span of just three weeks.12